My New Book, Gone Feral: June 12

It’s been a long time coming, but my new memoir, Gone Feral: Tracking My Dad Through the Wild, will be released on June 12. The book is very personal–about my hippie parents, my feral father, and my journey to become a parent myself. “There is much to be learned here for all daughters — about acceptance, about redemption, about the distances we must go at times to find our own deepest familial truths,” wrote the author Elizabeth Gilbert about Gone Feral.

I’ll be doing several events in the Bay Area, hope you can come to one of these:
BAY AREA READINGS
-June 13 at Pegasus Books on Shattuck, Berkeley, 7:30
-June 14 at the Temescal Public Library, Oakland, 12pm
-June 16 at Omnivore Books, SF, 6:30pm
-June 17 at Books Inc, Alameda, 7pm
-June 18 at Book Passage, Corte Madera, 7pm
-June 19 at Copperfield’s Sebastopol, 7pm

Then I head to the Pacific Northwest, via roadtrip with my daughter, my sister, and her daughter! Should be epic.
-June 30 at Powell’s (main store), Portland, 7pm
-July 1 at Town Hall in Seattle, 7:30
-July 2 at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, 7pm
-July 8 at the Olympia Public Library, 6:30pm
-July 10 at BookPeople in Moscow, ID 6:30pm
-July 15 at Eagle Public Library in Eagle, ID, 7pm
-July 18 at Carson City Public Library in Nevada

VERY IMPORTANT: If you can’t come to one of these events (I know, it’s wedding season), consider pre-ordering a copy of Gone Feral through Amazon or Powell’s. You can pre-order on Amazon here. Amazon chose it as one of their favorite books for the month of June! Or at Powell’s here or find your closest bookstore that sells Gone Feral thru Indiebound.

The reviews have been trickling in, here are a few of them:
“Like the offspring of so many of the hippie back-to-the-landers of the 1970s, Carpenter, herself an urban farmer (Farm City, 2009), and her sister received only minimal parental attention, which was further diminished when their parents split over the strain of free love and a lax work ethic. When her mother took the girls to Washington, leaving their father behind on a sprawling Idaho homestead, they never thought he would disappear from their lives. The phone call that comes nearly 30 years later saying that George, their
now 73-year-old father, really has gone missing motivates Carpenter to try to find the man, literally and figuratively, whom her father became. Spurred on by a desire to raise a family of her own and decipher the genetic code for either survival or destruction that she might be passing on, Carpenter performs a wild pas de deux with the cantankerous George, approaching him as one would a wild animal with no trust in humanity. Carpenter chronicles her daring quest for understanding and familial continuity in this sincere and remarkably uninhibited memoir.”
–Carol Haggas, Booklist

“Oakland author Novella Carpenter clearly remembers the day her dad went missing — it was Oct. 17, 2009, when he vanished from his Idaho town. In this engaging memoir, Carpenter realizes that George — a free-spirited 73-year-old homesteader — had been missing in action for most of her life. Carpenter writes with humor and honesty about searching for him — and what the experience taught her about being a daughter and a mother.”
–San Jose Mercury News

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9 responses to “My New Book, Gone Feral: June 12”

I wrote a review of the book on Amazon a month ago. Cannot tell you what a fantastic read it was. You have a way of describing things be it overgrown yards in a rundown cabin your Dad had, to the river you were at where I almost heard it, and saw it rushing by.

Or the car you guys drove and how it must have felt in wet weather, horrid heat. Have never been to the small towns in Idaho or Oregon where you went, but I could ‘see’ them so clearly in how you wrote about them. Hated for the book to end…. Hope you write another book because you left me wanting more.

I am so excited to read this! I regularly let people know that Farm City is my favorite book out of all the farming in the city/urban homesteading books. Can’t wait to read it! (As I do with all books–due to my limited budget–I will have my library order a copy, they are so good to me, ordering pretty much everything I request).